About

The 11th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis 2018) will be held in Kobe, Japan during April 10 to 13, 2018. Visualization has become an increasingly important research area due to its wide range of applications in many disciplines. PacificVis is an IEEE sponsored international visualization symposium held in the Asia-Pacific region, with the objective to foster greater exchange between visualization researchers and practitioners, and to draw more researchers in the Asia-Pacific region to enter this rapidly growing area of research.

PacificVis is a unified visualization symposium, welcoming all areas of visualization research such as: information visualization, scientific visualization, graph and network visualization, visual analytics, and specific applications such as (but not limited to) security-, software- and bio-visualization. Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research and application papers in all areas of visualization. We encourage papers in any new, novel, and exciting research area that pertains to visualization.

Best Poster Awards

Visualizing Dynamic Network via Sampled Massive Sequence ViewPosterYanmin She (Central South University, China)Wenjiang Chen (Central South University, China)Feng Luo (Central South University, China)JunRong Liu (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Science, China)Fangfang Zhou (Central South University, China)Ying Zhao (Central south university, China)Massive Sequence View is an important timeline-based technique for dynamic network visualization. However, MSV often suffers from severe visual clutter when limited screen space holds excessive network edges. In this paper, inspired by the use of graph sampling in static graph analysis, we propose to utilize graph sampling to reduce visual clutter in MSV. An edge sampling method based on accept-reject random sampling is designed for visualizing dynamic network via MSV. The method is able to improve the overall readability of MSV while preserving time-varying network behaviors. This method is also a preliminary attempt to apply graph sampling technique into dynamic network analysis.

Visual Style Exploration in Well-designed DiagramsPosterMin Lu (ShenZhen University, China)Nowadays there are numerous diagrams in good style designed by artists available online, which can serve as the reference to the visualization design. In this work, we present a visual analytic system to explore well-designed diagrams collected from Infographics, which support users to retrieve diagrams with specified styler features. Currently we consider the global style features, such as Histogram of Gradients, color histograms, etc. Meanwhile, with image processing method, diagrams are decomposed into visual elements, for each of which localized style features will be computed in next step. With the query interface, users are support to query diagrams with both globally and locally specified style features. Lastly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by two global query cases

Honorable Mention Poster Awards

A Fully Parallel Particle-based Volume Rendering for Large-Scale Unstructured Volume DatasetsPosterKengo Hayashi (Graduate School of System Informatics Kobe University, Japan)Yoshiaki Yamaoka (Kobe University, Japan)Naohisa Sakamoto (Kobe University, Japan)Jorji Nonaka (RIKEN AICS, Japan)Large-scale simulation results from high performance computing (HPC) systems have continuously increased in size and complexity, thus making the visualization and exploration tasks more challenging. Although volume rendering is widely recognized as an effective visualization technique, its usage on large-scale distributed unstructured volume datasets can become a difficult task because of the necessary and time-consuming visibility sorting process. In this work, we focused on the particle-based volume rendering (PBVR) method, because of its visibility sorting-free nature, for handling such datasets. We propose a fully parallel PBVR by parallelizing also the particle rendering phase, which remained serial (non-parallel) in the previous proposed approaches. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluated by using a large-scale distributed unstructured thermal fluid simulation result, and could obtain encouraging results for pushing forward to continue further developments and improvements in this approach.

TextTimeline: Visualizing Acoustic Features and Vocalized Timing along Display TextPosterTomoyasu Nakano (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan)Jun Kato (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan)Masataka Goto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan)We propose a novel interface, called TextTimeline, that visualizes acoustic features (e.g., intensity), the timing of each word, and each word’s time length (duration) along its displayed text. Although there were interfaces that visualized acoustic features of utterances with associated text and displayed those features at the position of the text, the time axis of utterance was nonlinearly stretched according to the width of the displayed text, and the duration information was lost. TextTimeline visualizes the duration of each word while maintaining the width of the corresponding text. To visualize the acoustic features of each syllable, in addition to the text that is written horizontally, a vertical (orthogonally oriented) axis is added as a sound timeline. This is an interface that makes it possible to visualize the utterance style in detail while giving priority to text display.

Best Visualization Note Award

Optimal Sankey Diagrams via Integer ProgrammingNoteDavid Cheng Zarate (Monash University)Pierre Le Bodic (Monash University)Tim Dwyer (Monash University)Graeme Gange (University of Melbourne)Peter Stuckey (University of Melbourne)We present the first practical Integer Linear Programming model for Sankey Diagram layout. We show that this approach is viable in terms of running time for reasonably complex diagrams (e.g. more than 50 nodes and 100 edges) and also that the quality of the layout is measurably and visibly better than heuristic approaches in terms of crossing reduction. Finally, we demonstrate that the model is easily extensible (compared to complex heuristics) through the addition of constraints, such as arbitrary grouping of nodes.

Honorable Mention Visualization Note Award

Development of an Integrated Visualization System for Phenotype Character NetworksNoteYosuke Onoue (Kyoto University)Koji Kyoda (RIKEN)Miki Kioka (Kyoto University)Kazutaka Baba (Kyoto University)Shuichi Onami (RIKEN)Koji Koyamada (Kyoto University)Wet and dry biological data are potentially complementary. By visually integrating the initiation and developmental processes of organisms, we might reveal new causalities in biological data. Here we present an integrated visualization system for a causality network constructed from phenotypic developmental characters and their related scientific literature. To obtain the phenotypic characters, we applied bio-imaging informatics techniques to the data of wet experiments. The phenotypic character network was visually rendered in the CausalNet system, which provides both explanatory and verification visualization functions. Statistical analysis and scientific literature mining proved useful for determining the mechanisms underlying the phenotypic trait network. The validity of the system was confirmed in an application example and expert feedback on the developmental process of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The discussed methodology is applicable to other multicellular organisms.

Best Paper Award

GANViz: A Visual Analytics Approach to Understand the Adversarial GamePaperJunpeng Wang (The Ohio State University, United States)Liang Gou (Visa Research, United States)Hao Yang (Visa Research, United States)Han-Wei Shen (The Ohio State University, United States)Generative models bear promising implications to learn data representations in an unsupervised fashion with deep learning. Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) is one of the most popular frameworks in this arena. Despite the promising results from different types of GANs, in-depth understanding on the adversarial training process of the models remains a challenge to domain experts. The complexity and the potential long-time training process of the models make it hard to evaluate, interpret, and optimize them. In this work, guided by practical needs from domain experts, we design and develop a visual analytics system, GANViz, aiming to help experts understand the adversarial process of GANs in-depth. Specifically, GANViz evaluates the model performance of two subnetworks of GANs, provides evidence and interpretations of the models’ performance, and empowers comparative analysis with the evidence. Through our case studies with two real-world datasets, we demonstrate that GANViz can provide useful insight into helping domain experts understand, interpret, evaluate, and potentially improve GAN models.

Honorable Mention Paper Award

MeetingVis: Visual Narratives to Assist in Recalling Meeting Context and ContentPaperYang Shi (IDVX Lab, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, China)Chris Bryan (University of California-Davis, United States)Sridatt Bhamidipati (University of California, Davis, United States)Ying Zhao (Central south university, China)Yaoxue Zhang (University of Central South University, China)Kwan-Liu Ma (University of California, Davis, United States)content from a previously held meeting can lead to better planning and preparation. However, ineffective meeting summaries can impair this process, especially when participants have difficulty remembering what was said and what its context was. To assist with this process, we introduce MeetingVis, a narrative-based approach visually summarizing meetings. MeetingVis is composed of two primary components: (1) a data pipeline that processes the spoken audio from a group discussion, and (2) a visual-based interface that efficiently displays the summarized content. To design MeetingVis, we create a taxonomy of relevant meeting data points, identifying salient elements to promote recall and reflection. These are mapped to an augmented storyline visualization, which combines the display of participant activities, topic evolutions, and task assignments. For evaluation, we conduct a qualitative user study with five groups. Feedback indicates that MeetingVis effectively triggers the recall of subtle details from prior meetings: all study participants were able to remember new details, points, and tasks compared to an unaided, memory-only baseline. This visual-based approaches can also potentially enhance the productivity of both individuals and the whole team.

Visual Interactive Map MatchingPaperRobert Krueger (Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany)Georgi Simeonov (Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems, Germany)Fabian Beck (paluno, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)Thomas Ertl (Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS), Germany)Map matching is the process of assigning observed geographic positions of vehicles and their trajectories to the actual road links in a road network. In this paper, we present Visual Interactive Map Matching, a visual analytics approach to fine-tune the data preprocessing and matching process. It is based on ST-matching, a state-of-the-art and easy-to-understand map matching algorithm. Parameters of the preprocessing step and algorithm can be optimized with immediate visual feedback. Visualizations show current matching issues and performance metrics on a map and in diagrams. Manual and computer-supported editing of the road network model leads to a refined alignment of trajectories and roads. We demonstrate our approach with large-scale taxi trajectory data. We show that optimizing the matching on a subsample results in considerably improved matching quality, also when later scaled to the full dataset. An optimized matching ensures data faithfulness and prevents misinterpretation when the matched data might be investigated in follow-up analysis.

Predominance Tag MapsPaperMartin Reckziegel (Leipzig University, Germany)Gerik Scheuermann (Leipzig University, Germany)Muhammad Faisal Cheema (Leipzig University, Germany)Stefan Jaenicke (Leipzig University, Germany)A predominance map expresses the predominant data category for each geographical entity and colors are used to differentiate a small number of data categories. In tag maps, many data categories are present in the form of different tags, but related tag map approaches do not account for predominance, as tags are either displaced from their respective geographical locations or visual clutter occurs. We propose predominance tag maps, a layout algorithm that accounts for predominance for arbitrary aggregation granularities. The algorithm is able to utilize the font sizes of the tags as visual variable and it is further configurable to implement aggregation strategies beyond visualizing predominance. We introduce various measures to evaluate numerically the qualitative aspects of tag maps regarding local predominance, global features, and layout stability and we comparatively analyze our method to the tag map approach by Thom et al. on the basis of real world data sets.

Call for Papers

Full Papers

All submitted papers will go through a two-stage review process to guarantee the publication of high-quality papers. All papers accepted by IEEE Pacific Visualization 2018 will be published by IEEE and will be also included in the IEEE Digital Library. Selected papers will be published directly in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract due

Sep. 22, 2017

Full paper due

Sep. 29, 2017

Reviews due

Nov. 5, 2017

1st cycle notification

Nov. 20, 2017

Revision due

Jan. 5, 2018

2nd cycle notification

Jan. 22, 2018

Camera ready paper due

Feb. 2, 2018

All deadlines are due at 9:00 pm Pacific Time (PDT/PST).

TOPICS

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Visualization Application Areas:

Statistical Graphics And Mathematics

Financial, Security And Business Visualization

Physical Sciences And Engineering

Earth, Space, And Environmental Sciences

Geographic/Geospatial/ Terrain Visualization

Molecular, Biomedical, Bioinformatics And Medical Visualization

Text, Documents And Software Visualization

Social, Ambient And Information Sciences

Education And Everyday Visualization

Multimedia (Image/Video/Music) Visualization

Any Other Non-Spatial Data Or Spatial Data That Is Visualized With A New Spatial Mapping

SUBMISSION

Original unpublished papers of up to ten (10) pages (two-column, single-spaced, 9 point font, including figures, tables and references) are invited. Manuscripts must be written in English, and follow the formatting guidelines. Reviewing will be double blind, please remove all author and affiliation information from submissions and supplemental files. Please substitute your paper’s ID number for the author name. Papers should be submitted electronically in Adobe PDF format. Please provide supplemental videos in QuickTime MPEG-4 or DivX version 5, and use TIFF, JPEG, or PNG for supplemental images.

Note: This page has previously shown a link to the formatting guidelines for the last year. If you started with your paper using that guidelines, do not worry. There is no update about the guidelines for this year. The link to the fortammting guidelines you see in the previous paragraph points to the same page as one we tentatively provided.

CAMERA READY

Please use the Author Kit for preparation of the camera ready copy. The page includes templates, an important checklist, and others.

PAPERS CHAIRS

PAPER TYPES

A VIS paper typically falls into one of five categories: technique, system, design study, evaluation, or model. We briefly discuss these categories below. Although your main paper type has to be specified during the paper submission process, papers can include elements of more than one of these categories. Please see “Process and Pitfalls in Writing Information Visualization Research Papers” by Tamara Munzner for more detailed discussion on how to write a successful VIS paper.

Technique papers introduce novel techniques or algorithms that have not previously appeared in the literature, or that significantly extend known techniques or algorithms, for example by scaling to datasets of much larger size than before or by generalizing a technique to a larger class of uses. The technique or algorithm description provided in the paper should be complete enough that a competent graduate student in visualization could implement the work, and the authors should create a prototype implementation of the methods. Relevant previous work must be referenced, and the advantage of the new methods over it should be clearly demonstrated. There should be a discussion of the tasks and datasets for which this new method is appropriate, and its limitations. Evaluation through informal or formal user studies, or other methods, will often serve to strengthen the paper, but are not mandatory.

System papers present a blend of algorithms, technical requirements, user requirements, and design that solves a major problem. The system that is described is both novel and important, and has been implemented. The rationale for significant design decisions is provided, and the system is compared to documented, best-of-breed systems already in use. The comparison includes specific discussion of how the described system differs from and is, in some significant respects, superior to those systems. For example, the described system may offer substantial advancements in the performance or usability of visualization systems, or novel capabilities. Every effort should be made to eliminate external factors (such as advances in processor performance, memory sizes or operating system features) that would affect this comparison. For further suggestions, please review “How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper” by Roy Levin and David Redell, and “Empirical Methods in CS and AI” by Toby Walsh.

Application / Design Study papers explore the choices made when applying visualization and visual analytics techniques in an application area, for example relating the visual encodings and interaction techniques to the requirements of the target task. Similarly, Application papers have been the norm when researchers describe the use of visualization techniques to glean insights from problems in engineering and science. Although a significant amount of application domain background information can be useful to provide a framing context in which to discuss the specifics of the target task, the primary focus of the case study must be the visualization content. The results of the Application / Design Study, including insights generated in the application domain, should be clearly conveyed. Describing new techniques and algorithms developed to solve the target problem will strengthen a design study paper, but the requirements for novelty are less stringent than in a Technique paper. Where necessary, the identification of the underlying parametric space and its efficient search must be aptly described. The work will be judged by the design lessons learned or insights gleaned, on which future contributors can build. We invite submissions on any application area.

Evaluation papers explore the usage of visualization and visual analytics by human users, and typically present an empirical study of visualization techniques or systems. Authors are not necessarily expected to implement the systems used in these studies themselves; the research contribution will be judged on the validity and importance of the experimental results as opposed to the novelty of the systems or techniques under study. The conference committee appreciates the difficulty and importance of designing and performing rigorous experiments, including the definition of appropriate hypotheses, tasks, data sets, selection of subjects, measurement, validation and conclusions. The goal of such efforts should be to move from mere description of experiments, toward prediction and explanation. We do suggest that potential authors who have not had formal training in the design of experiments involving human subjects may wish to partner with a colleague from an area such as psychology or human-computer interaction who has experience with designing rigorous experimental protocols and statistical analysis of the resulting data. Other novel forms of evaluation are also encouraged.

Theory/Model papers present new interpretations of the foundational theory of visualization and visual analytics. Implementations are usually not relevant for papers in this category. Papers should focus on basic advancement in our understanding of how visualization techniques complement and exploit properties of human vision and cognition.

Visualization Notes

The 11th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis 2018) will be held in Kobe, Japan during April 10 to 13, 2018. Visualization has become an increasingly important research area due to its wide range of applications in many disciplines. PacificVis is an IEEE sponsored international visualization symposium held in the Asia-Pacific region, with the objective to foster greater exchange between visualization researchers and practitioners, and to draw more researchers in the Asia-Pacific region to enter this rapidly growing area of research.

PacificVis 2018 features a short paper track, called “Visualization Notes.” The purpose of this track is to encourage young researchers to present their work and discuss with participants including senior researchers there. The submissions can be late-breaking results and work in progress, while they should be novel enough to attract interest from the visualization community.

The suggested topics for the “Visualization Notes” are the same as those for full papers, while the ideas there can be relatively small as compared with those for full papers. Nonetheless, the “Visualization Notes” are still expected to contain technically interesting results in theories and/or applications. Please note that all submissions must be original and thus have not been published elsewhere. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed through a single-stage process by the international program committee. Accepted short papers will be included in the conference proceedings and in IEEE digital library.

IMPORTANT DATES

Notes Deadline

Dec. 4, 2017

Notes Notification

Jan. 12, 2018

Camera ready Notes due

Feb. 2, 2018

The deadline is due at 9:00 pm Pacific Time (PST).

Submission

Original unpublished short paper submissions of up to 4 pages (two-column, single-spaced, 9-point font, including figures and tables) without references or 5 pages including references are invited. Manuscripts must be written in English, and follow the formatting guidelines. Reviewing will be double blind, so please remove all author and affiliation information from submissions and supplemental files. Please substitute your paper’s ID number for the author name. Papers should be submitted electronically in Adobe PDF format. Please provide supplemental videos in QuickTime MPEG-4 or DivX version 5, and use TIFF, JPEG, or PNG for supplemental images.

Visualization Notes Co-Chairs

Posters

The 11th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis 2018) will be held in Kobe, Japan during April 10 to 13, 2018. PacificVis 2018 is soliciting high quality poster proposals. The PacificVis 2018 poster program is welcoming all areas of visualization research such as: information, scientific, graph, security, software and bio-visualization. Authors are encouraged to submit work in progress and practical applications to demonstrate novel and applicable ideas in all aspects of visualization.

An interactive poster session will be held to allow plenty of opportunities for one-on-one dialogue and small group discussion in a casual setting. Extended abstracts of the accepted posters will be included in the electronic conference proceedings (USB memory stick distributed to conference attendants).

IMPORTANT DATES

Poster papers submission deadline

Jan. 19, 2018

Poster papers notification

Feb. 7, 2018

Camera ready poster papers due

Feb. 21, 2018

Deadlines are due at 9:00 pm Pacific Time (PST).

Submission

Submissions should be made electronically in Adobe PDF by the deadline. Poster abstract submissions of up to 2 pages (two-column, single-spaced, 9 point font, including figures and tables) are invited. Manuscripts must be written in English, and follow the formatting guidelines. The posters will be peer-reviewed in a one-stage single-blind process. Posters will be evaluated by the PacificVis 2018 Poster Co-Chairs based on the level of contribution, validity of the results, originality, and clarity of presentation. The reviewing will be based primarily on the abstract content but will consider other supplemental materials (videos, images, and so on) if provided.

Poster Presentation

Accepted poster will be presented at the poster session of the conference. The final posters should be printed with no larger than paper size A0 size (841mm x 1189mm / 33.1″ x 46.8″). At least one author of an accepted poster must register for and attend the conference to present the work. Authors will also be required to present a brief summary of their talk at the fast-forward session.

Contact

For questions regarding poster submission, please do not hesitate to contact the chairs directly via pvis_posters(at)pvis.org

PacificVis is a unified visualization symposium, welcoming all areas of visualization such as: information, scientific, graph, security, and software visualization. Storytellers are invited to submit visual data-driven stories that draw upon any of these areas. Unlike contests such as the VAST challenge or the SciVis Contest, the data for the PacificVis visual data storytelling contest will be left unspecified; storytellers are free to choose any publicly-available dataset(s). Similarly, the task that storytellers are to accomplish is to successfully communicate a message or series of messages (i.e., a narrative, a series of insights) using visualization techniques and supported by the underlying data. The themes of the story can draw from any topic, including current affairs, history, natural disasters, and research findings from the sciences and humanities.

Entries may be submitted by teams or individuals, and from both industry and academia alike. Conference sponsors can participate non-competitively. Submissions must fulfill the requirements explained below:

Requirements:

Submissions can take several forms:

Website: an author-hosted website is preferred, however authors may opt to submit a .zip archive of a website containing all dependencies and a readme .txt or .md file with instructions on how to view the website locally. Authors submitting a website are also highly encouraged to submit a .zip archive containing screenshots and/or a video capture of the website via PCS as a fallback in the event that the contest chairs and judges are unable to view the website. Authors are encouraged to use interactive and animated elements that advance the story, such as scrollytelling waypoints or stepper navigation controls. Websites that require the viewer to engage in substantial exploratory interaction are discouraged.

Video: .mp4, .avi, or .mov formats are preferred, with a maximum length of 5 minutes. Note that video submissions that appear to be tutorials or demonstrations of a visualization tool will not be considered; the focus of the submission must be a visual narrative about the data, not a visualization tool or technique.

Data Comic: a multi-page .pdf file that tells a story in the style of a comic book.

Infographic: a single-page poster .pdf file that tells a story.

A succinct story title or headline.

A 150-word extended abstract using the IEEE VGTC poster template that briefly describes the data analysis and design process undertaken by the storyteller(s). The abstract should not include the message(s) communicated by the story; the story must stand alone in this regard such that a viewer should not need to read the abstract to understand the story. If submitting the story as a website, authors must include the URL of the story in this abstract.

A list of references that include the publicly-available dataset(s) that informed the story and those that are visually represented within the story, as well as any tools, libraries, previously published techniques, or software applications used during the data analysis and story design process.

The story must feature at least one programmatically-generated visual representation of data; visual representations of data generated by manual illustration (e.g., on paper, using illustration software) are allowed; however, these representations must be used in conjunction with a programmatically-generated visual representations of data. In addition, the programmatically-generated visual representation(s) should be the authors’ own work, using techniques or tools created by the authors. Third party techniques or applications may be used in conjunction with the authors’ own work as long as proper credit is given to their respective creators and it is made clear which aspects of the implementation represent the authors’ own work.

The entries must be original data-driven stories that have not been previously published elsewhere.

For the winning entries we expect the following additional requirements:

At least one member of the winning team must register for the conference and be present at the contest’s poster session and award ceremony.

Awards and Rating

A jury of visualization and data storytelling experts will carefully judge each submission. Successful entries will effectively communicate a narrative, message(s), or insight(s) using visual representations of data. Each judge assigned to a submission will give the submission a score from 1 to 5, and they will be asked the following questions:

Is this work relevant for the PacificVis Data Storytelling Contest?

Is the story original (i.e, not previously published elsewhere)?

Is the story engaging and interesting?

Is the narrative point or message of the story clearly discernible? Are insights clearly communicated?

Are data sources adequately referenced?

Are data sources publicly available?

Does the story feature at least one programmatically-generated visual representation of data?

Is it clear which aspects of the story represents the author(s)’ own work, using techniques or tools created by the authors?

Is proper credit given to the creators of third party techniques or applications used to generate the story?

Winning entries will receive a certificate.

Jury

Name

Affiliation

Hirofumi Abe

Japan Broadcasting Corporation

RJ Andrews

Info We Trust

Steven Braun

Northeastern University

Jen Christiansen

Scientific American

Marti Hearst

University of California, Berkeley

Kenji Ishimaru

Polygon Pictures Inc.

Asanobu Kitamoto

National Institute of Informatics

Isabel Meirelles

OCAD University

Jonathan Roberts

Bangor University

Contact

For questions regarding the contest, please do not hesitate to contact the chairs directly via contest@pvis.org.

Contest chairs:

Matthew Brehmer, Microsoft Research, USA

Ingrid Hotz, Linköping University, Sweden

Hidenori Watanave, the University of Tokyo, Japan

PacificVAST 2018 Call for Papers

PacificVAST 2018 is an international workshop collocated with PacificVis 2018. The workshop is held on April 10th, the first day of the symposium.

In PacificVAST, participants share their state-of-the-art research results and fresh perspectives on visual analytics. Visual analytics is a discipline concerned with science and technology for analytical reasoning supported by interactive visual interfaces. Most papers presented in PacificVAST are distinguished from traditional visualization papers in that they harmoniously integrate interactive visual interfaces with analytical techniques from statistics, data mining, or machine learning fields to help analyze overwhelming amounts of disparate, conflicting, and dynamic information.

All aspects of visual analytics are covered in PacificVAST including, but not limited to the following topics:

Theories and techniques of visual representations based on cognitive and perceptual principles that can be deployed through engineered, reusable components

Novel visual paradigms that support the (collaborative) analytical reasoning process

Theories and techniques of user interactions that support the analytical reasoning process

Data representations, transformations, and integrations

Theory and practice for transforming data into new scalable representations that faithfully represent the content of the underlying data

Methods to synthesize information of different types and from different sources into a unified data representation

Methods and principles for representing data quality, reliability, and certainty measures throughout the data transformation and analysis process

Techniques and systems for production, presentation, and dissemination of analysis results

Methodology and tools that enable the capture of the analytic assessment, decision recommendations, and first responder actions into information packages

Technologies and systems that enable analysts to communicate what they know through the use of appropriate visual metaphor and accepted principles of reasoning and graphic representation

Techniques and tools that enable effective use of limited, mobile forms of technologies to support situation assessment by first responders

Methodologies and benchmarks for evaluating visual analytics techniques and systems

Infrastructure to facilitate evaluation of new visual analytics technologies

Ecologically valid evaluation methods for visual analytics tools

For fostering a stronger visual analytics community in the Asia-Pacific region, PacificVAST starts a new publishing model this year: ALL accepted papers will be published in a special issue of the Elsevier Journal of Visual Informatics on the day of the workshop.

Important dates

Deadline for submission

December 11th (Mon), 2017

First round notification

February 2 (Fri), January 19th (Fri), 2018

Deadline for Revision

February 23 (Fri), February 9th (Fri), 2018

Second round notification

March 12 (Mon), February 25th (Mon), 2018

Deadline for camera ready draft

March 28 (Wed), March 12th (Mon), 2018

Deadlines are due at 23:59 Pacific Time (PST).

Submission guidelines

For those who want to submit their paper: Send us at pacific_vast (at) pvis.org, a simple e-mail containing the title, the list of author(s), abstract, and the name and e-mail address of corresponding author. Upon receipt of your request, we will send back a link for the submission to the special issue. There is no page limit, but authors are encouraged to submit papers whose length is proportional to their contributions, and the manuscript should be carefully prepared according to the guide for authors

Integrated Research Center of Kobe University

The Integrated Research Center of Kobe University was founded in April 2011 for the purposes of promoting advanced interdisciplinary research, one of the University’s strengths, and exploring the social applications of research. Eight research projects in the newly-built research building (the west side of the main building) were launched in April 2011 and the hall building (the east side of the main building) was added in March 2012. In March 2015, the new annex building was completed with a total floor area of approximately 9,500 m2.

About Kobe

Kobe is an international port city nestled below the beautiful Rokko mountain range and fronted by a tranquil blue inland sea, within the Seto Naikai National Park. People from 131 countries live here and provide Kobe with a colorful, vibrant and cosmopolitan character. As well as its sea port access, downtown Kobe is easily reached by air, road and rail. Kobe has its own domestic airport and the Kansai International Airport nearby. This is why Kobe has hosted more than 4,600 international conventions to date, and why it is one of Japanʼ s key convention cities. In 2013, the Japanese Government appointed Kobe as a ʻGlobal MICE Strategic Cityʼ on behalf of the nation.